Finalists: D2 Legal Technology; DataNovo (LUMA-ID); DMR Collation; Infosec Cloud (highly commended).

Fulcrum Global Technologies' outsourced global billing system helped it win the supplier innovation award for services.

The Virtual Operations Deployment (VOD) billing service implemented for Norton Rose Fulbright complements the firm's practice management system (also provided by Fulcrum) by streamlining the billing process, making invoicing quicker, more accurate and cost-effective. The service means all that lawyers need to do is enter how much time they spent on a matter and Fulcrum's billing services team does everything else.

A fully integrated work-in-progress tool means that fee earners and billing staff (both in-house and at Fulcrum) can see the status of matters in real-time, allowing the billing process to be initiated instantly.

The result is that bills are sent to clients faster and fees potentially collected sooner, improving the firm's cashflow (existing in-house billing staff could only handle roughly seven invoices per person a day, whereas VOD can process on average about 15). That has reduced the costs associated with manual invoicing and allowed the firm's staff to concentrate on more value-added work.

Future tweaks will include the introduction of the VOD BillingBot, which uses AI to learn billing-team behaviour and automate nearly all the steps in the billing process.

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